EMBA的小眼睛

In search of resilience

Most of the time, we build our jobs and our organizations and our lives around today, assuming that tomorrow will be a lot like now. Resilience, the ability to shift and respond to change, comes way down the list of the things we often consider.

And yet... A crazy world is certain to get crazier. The industrial economy is fading, and steady jobs with it. The financial markets will inevitably get more volatile. The Earth is warming, ever faster, and the rate and commercial impact of natural disasters around the world is on an exponential growth curve.

Hence the need for resilience, for the ability to survive and thrive in the face of change.

A non-resilient hospital in New York City closed for months because the designers failed to design for a flood. A career as a travel agent ends when, fairly suddenly, people don't need travel agents any longer. A retirement is wiped out because the sole asset in the nest egg is no longer worth what it was.

Spend the day with me in New York in June

I've been remiss in scheduling these full-day transformative Q&A sessions and I miss them.

You can find the details and tickets right here.

Here's one take on some of the things we covered in an expanded seminar last summer.

This is the tenth anniversary of Purple Cow, too, so we'll celebrate that as well. Cake for everyone.

Tried and false

The tried and true is beyond reproach. It's been tried, and of course, it's true. True because it worked.

In times of change, though, most of the tried is in fact, false. False because what used to work, doesn't, at least not any longer.

Sure, it might be what you've always done. But that doesn't make it true, or right, or best. It just means that you already tried it.

The nature of revolutions is that they destroy the perfect and enable the impossible. Seeking out the tried and true is the wrong direction for crazy times.

^{The critic stumbles}

^{Last week, I saw an extraordinary play on Broadway. It got the longest standing ovation I've ever seen in a theater, and Alan Cumming deserved every minute of it. The New York Times critic, though, didn't like the show.}

^{What's the point of his review, then? Clearly the audience, discerning in their own right, disagreed. Do mainstream critics exist to tell us what to like, to warn us off from the not-so-good, or are they there to punish those that would dare to make a piece of work that doesn't match the critic's view of the world? Perhaps the critic is saying, "people like me will have an opinion like this," but of course, there just aren't that many people like him.}

^{Have you noticed just how often the critics disagree with one another? And how often they're just wrong?}

^{And yet we not only read them, but we believe them. Worse, we judge ourselves, contrasting our feelings with their words. Worse still, we sometimes think we hear the feared critic's voice before we even ship our work out the door...}

Committing to a cycle of honest communication

Is there any better way to start a business partnership? Any partnership?

If you're unable to have substantial conversations with your boss and co-workers, go get some professional help. It's not personal, it's business.

The inability to say the thing that will make everything better (because of fear of shifting the status quo) is a project killer.

Skeumorphs = failure

For as long as I've been in digital media, skeumorphs have annoyed me.

The original CD ROMs, for example, often had a home screen that started with a bookshelf, and you clicked on the 'book' you wanted to 'open' (excessive use of quotations intentional). Here's the thing: bookshelves are a great idea if you want to store actual books on an actual shelf. They're a silly way to index digital information, though.

If you haven't guessed, a skeumorph is a design element from an old thing, added to a new one. I think that printing a cork-colored filter on a cigarette that no longer has cork involved is just fine. But when skeumorphs get in the way of how we actually use something or build something, they demonstrate a lack of imagination or even cowardice on the part of the designer. (Sooner or later, just about everything, even the alphabet I am writing with, could be considered skeumorphic... my point is that embracing the convenient at the expense of the effective is where the failure happens).

Craig Mod writes eloquently about this, which reminded me of some of what we did with the covers for the books from the Domino Project more than a year ago. We can take this thinking even further, though.

Frequency, repetition and the power of saying it more than once

"I'm only going to tell you this once..."

There's a lot to be said for conditioning your audience to listen carefully. If they know that valuable information is only going to come at them once, they'll be more alert for it.

Alas, as the nois-o-sphere gets noisier still, this approach is hard to justify.

Repetition increases the chance that you get heard.

Avoiding the custom bully

Here's the thing: no matter how much you paid for your ticket, you never bother to even try bullying the conductor or the gate agent to get your train or plane to leave a few minutes later.

It leaves when it leaves, that's the deal.

Part of the challenge of selling custom work is that it sometimes seems that everything is up for grabs. You should stay up all night for a week. You should rearrange the orchids in order of smell, because even though it's not in the spec, hey, that would be good service, and we are paying a lot...

Promising perfect is actually not nearly as useful as promising what the rules are.

A field guide to the Meeting Troll

The meeting troll is a common creature, one that morphs over time and is good at hiding (snaring you when it's too late to avoid him.)

1. The meeting troll has a neverending list of reasonable objections. It's the length of the list that makes the objections unreasonable.
2. The meeting troll never says 'we'. It's all about 'you.'
3. The meeting troll doesn't actually want you to fail, but is establishing a trail so that if you do, he's off the hook.
4. Despite his protestations about how much he hates meetings, the meeting troll actually thrives on them, because, after all, this is the only place he gets to do his best work. The very best way to extinguish the meeting troll is to extinguish meetings. The second best way is to not invite him.
5. A key giveway: The meeting troll will use the phrase, "devil's advocate." More than once.
6. Growth hackers look for a yes at every turn. The meeting troll thinks his job is to find the no.
7. The meeting troll never eagerly calls a project meeting, nor does he bring refreshments, volunteer to organize follow up or encourage others to push their ideas even further. He's eager, though, to host the post mortem.
8. One particularly noxious type of meeting troll says not a thing at the meeting. He uses body language and eye rolling to great advantage, though, and you can be sure that there will be quiet one-on-one undermining going on as soon as the meeting is over. The modern evolution of this is the instant messaging of snide remarks during the meeting.
9. The meeting troll has a perfect memory for previous failures and complete amnesia when it comes to things that have worked.
10. Analogies, particularly to vivid flameouts (regardless of how rare or irrelevant) is the easy tool for the amateur troll. He's also good at equating your desire to deal with negative change with the assertion that you somehow caused or were in favor of that negative change.
11. Open-ended questions that merely hint at failure are sufficient for the experienced troll. He knows that he doesn't have to kill the new project for it to die. He just has to stir up sufficient unease.
12. The meeting troll is afraid, not merely evil. Change is a threat, and trolling is his well-intentioned but erroneous response to the threat of change.

Neophilia as a form of hiding

Every once in a while someone will say to me, "yeah, sure, I've heard that before... what do you have that's new?"

In contemporary art or movies, it makes perfect sense to be focused on the bleeding edge, on the new idea that's never been previously contemplated.

But when we're discussing our goals, our passion and the way we interact with the culture, it seems to me that what works is significantly more important than what's new. Racing to build your organization around the latest social network tool or graphics-rendering technology permits you to spend a lot of time learning the new system and skiing in the fresh powder of the unproven, but it might just distract you from the difficult work of telling the truth, looking people in the eye and making a difference.

"I can't describe the value we deliver, I'm too busy integrating this new technology into my workflow!"

Degrees of freedom

The more choices, the more freedom, the more freedom, the harder it is to decide what to do next.

When parachute jumping, at the key point, there are only two degrees of freedom: jump or not.

When marketing, of course, there are more degrees of freedom than in any other endeavor an organization does. It's almost never A or B. You need several alphabets just to list the available options.

If you don't view that as a good thing, it's probably worth doing something else instead.

When you sell unlimited hope...

then all news is bad news. That's because news is fact, what happened, not hope, and the truth can't possibly be as good as the hope was.

The problem with marketing promises that spin out of control, that pile expectations on top of dreams, is that when reality appears, when the quarterly numbers or the new policies or the final product arrives, it will inevitably disappoint.

This is the challenge of the Kickstarter artist, the growth stock CEO and the well-published author. Dreams are irresistible, but they will never match reality when it finally appears.

The loneliness epidemic

The next time you feel lonely, disconnected or unappreciated, consider that unlike many other maladies, this one hits everyone. And unlike other challenges, this one is easily overcome by realizing that you can cure the problem by connecting, appreciating and leading.

The minute we realize that the person sitting next to us needs us (and our tribe, our forward motion and the value we create), we're able to extinguish their aloneness as well as ours.

When you shine a light, both of you can see better.

Is the new Kindle Zero the sign of things to come?

It was always going to happen, but most of us didn't think it would happen so soon. Every Kindle has been cheaper than the one before it...

This afternoon, Amazon is going to announce the Kindle Zero, (screenshot) the first ebook reader that's free (to Prime members, of which there are millions). If you want one, you should hurry, because free goes quick... (here's a sneak preview of the prototype Zero)

The trend has been clear--electronic devices always get cheaper, and locking people into a platform has always been profitable. Hotmail, search engines... free is the driver of attention.

Beyond the surprise of leaping into the free reader, though, are the announcements from Random House and Wiley that 10% of their titles (the ones that used to be free) will now come with a cash incentive. (HT to Kevin for the original idea).

Conservation of energy in conversation

If you escalate (cut off in traffic, angry at the gate agent, frustrated at your boss), you've just added (negative) energy to a conversation.

If you escalate (high-pitched enthusiasm, a hug, encouraging words), you've just added (positive) energy to a conversation.

Once the energy is added, it has to go somewhere. Often, the person you're engaging with throws it right back, or even increases it. A talented, mature person might take your negative energy and de-escalate it, or even swallow it and permit the conversation to calm down or end. But don't count on it.

Sure, you can 'win' a conversation by overwhelming your opponent with energy they can't handle. But of course, they're not your opponent and you don't really win. Being aware of the energy you add or take from interactions is a sophisticated technique that radically changes the outcomes of the conversations that fill your day. Add the good stuff, absorb the bad stuff and focus on the outcomes, not the bravado.

Surprise!

We like positive surprises and fear negative ones.

That means (surprisingly) that it's better to have a consistently negative experience than to confront one that's sometimes negative and sometimes neutral. The TSA, for example, would be easier to take if they were always consistently irrational, time-wasting and disrespectful, thus eliminating the risk and replacing it with certainty.

On the other hand, a positive experience that's positive all the time pales in comparison with the experience that's sometimes neutral but often nice. Beyond a baseline of goodness, you're better off awarding a few people a random discount or a bump up in priority than you are making something consistently (and boringly) slightly more pleasant.

The brand is a story. But it's a story about you, not about the brand.

Why prefer Coke over Pepsi or GE over Samsung or Ford over Chevy?

In markets that aren't natural monopolies or where there are clear, agreed-upon metrics, how do we decide?

Yes, every brand has a story—that's how it goes from being a logo and a name to a brand. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story makes us say we "love Google" or "love Harley"... but what do we really love?

We love ourselves.

Is this the best you can do?

If the answer to this is "yes," and you think you're done, you might be settling too soon.

The right question is, "Is this the best your team can do?" And if you need a better team, it's never been easier to get one. Especially if you're a soloist, a freelancer or a small company--if your upside is limited by the people you're working with, get new people.

Any time you do work yourself, you've chosen not to use the services of someone who's probably better at it than you are. There might be really good reasons for that choice, but inertia isn't one of them.

You don't have to pander

Merely giving the people what they want is a shortcut to banality, mediocrity and invisibility.

The agency that gives its clients exactly what they think they want never deserves to win Agency of the Year, and worse, is rarely seen as the leader in the field, the trusted advisor that is smart enough to know what the client ought to want instead. They certainly can't charge more or hire better team members.

I'm defining pandering as using your perception of your customer's wishes as an excuse to do work you're not proud of.

The public radio station that puts on empty, sensationalist coverage of the current crisis-of-the-year is chasing others down the rabbithole, a chase it can't (and doesn't want to) win. [The excuse is always the same—it's what the listeners want!]

Your manifesto, your culture

It's so easy to string together a bunch of platitudes and call them a mission statement. But what happens if you actually have a specific mission, a culture in mind, a manifesto for your actions?

The essential choice is this: you have to describe (and live) the difficult choices. You have to figure out who you will disappoint or offend. Most of all, you have to be clear about what's important and what you won't or can't do.

Here's one that was published this week, by my friends at Acumen:

Acumen: It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair.